Yeah but I mean, there's a difference between creating, say, a work tag for A modest destiny since it's the first question which will be asked about AMD, and a genre tag which you're thinking of making a "policy" of sorts

Not an actual policy but I don't have a synonym handy

user132126

Most of them were all created that way. Someone made it, others let it stand, because when they saw it they didn't go "No, that's awful, let's get rid of it"

user132126

Just because the site is older now, doesn't mean our privileges need to be hamstrung by bureaucracy

If you have a sincere intent to improve the site, and you're making a change that you're allowed to make and it doesn't cause harm, then you don't really need to double check with everyone else first.

user132126

Sometimes SFF.SE feels like it's cultured this environment of having to walk on eggshells in order to appease a few cantankerous souls, but the site continues to run nevertheless.

user132126

You don't have to walk on eggshells. You can do things! It's allowed! There's review queues for a reason. Edits bump questions for a reason. Community moderation does happen, and mostly without having to go to meta.

user132126

Now, if you went out of control, or someone was vehemently against some new thing you did, surely they could go to meta and be like "What gives?"

@WebHead Because they've been using them for a while, and when they first started they probably tried various things until they figured out how to properly use tags. But if you've been asking certain questions for years already, you have no reason to go looking to see if there is a new tag for it that you should use.

user132126

I don't know about that. I think most users try typing in a tag they think will work, and then go with that, and don't try too hard for anything else.

user132126

And then the people that do know about the tags edit the post and fix 'em.

@WebHead well, this is up to everyone, but from where I stand, announcing stuff after the fact and letting people deal with it, potentially wasting time, is disrespectful and not in my principles.

@WebHead correction, to be honest I think this is a tag that will be edited into said posts.

user132126

It's wasting our time having to debate improving the site in a clear tangible way, and letting the people who just hate tagging questions just pessimistically downvote anything tag related, despite most of them likely never having to worry about that specific tag.

@WebHead oh I thought you meant OP would think of the wdb-original tag

user132126

Story ID askers are generally new or first-time posters, many of which don't even ask a 2nd question on the site, or come back to see the answer. Creating a new, legitimate tag for story ID is always going to be the onus of people that actually care about it

@WebHead if we have to do things the hard way because having calm discussions is made impossible by bringing up the word "tag", there's a problem :/

user132126

12:31 AM

Meta has a place. For resolving conflicts, for posting community-relevant announcements, trying to come up with policies to handle common use-cases.

user132126

Most of our "Should we have a [blank] tag?" questions are about stuff that doesn't seem to really fit into the rest of our naming scheme.

user132126

And now, the way the meta question is worded as a "Should we or shouldn't we?" yes/no, which isn't super constructive. Compare that to "How can we improve this new tag [web-original]" which invites people to suggest wiki excerpts, ways to manage it, synonyms, etc.

user132126

I've been drawing lately and discovered that many dancers do movements-poses that remind me of super hero and action sequences.

user132126

user132126

That one, for instance, looks ready to cast an incantation or a fireball.

There are many spells in Harry Potter, such as Wingardium Leviosa or Expelliarmus. But then arises the great question: What led to this spell? Did someone create it, or did people just randomly do wand movements and say things? If so, wouldn't this be very dangerous?

I have a distinct memory from my kindergarten class in 1996 in which we watched an animated movie with Native Americans. It was two young men who went on an adventure with some sort of talking animal sidekick. If I remember correctly, they're looking for a jewel or amulet or something like that, ...

In Carl Sagan's novel, Contact, earth receives a message from extra terrestrial beings that has instructions to build a machine. Once the machine is built and activated with five passengers in it,
Why could this information not be sent in the message itself without having to make mankind go th...

In the question How did Ginny Weasley set the Basilisk on Muggleborns without getting killed or petrified?, Tom Riddle mentions that he had Ginny set the Basilisk on Mrs. Norris, Filch's cat.
‘Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets. She strangled the school roosters and daubed threateni...

@Jenayah Considering that it took you less than 3 seconds to find that, you get a lot of credit. Thanks. But I'm not sure I would quite consider it what I'm looking for. It seems like in this case the first answer engaged in logical speculation while the second answer cited various sources as evidence. I'm more looking for a case where both answers cite similar levels of evidence yet still manage to come to opposite conclusions.

I saw this question:
Which pure-blood supremacists were actually half-bloods?
and I was gonna be a smart-alec and answer 'all of them' as there are no actual pure-bloods anymore. However I couldn't find anything to canonically back this up, so I can't be sure. There's the quote from Hagrid in T...

While re-listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (audiobook), I noticed that after Sirius tried to get into the Gryffindor common room, and everyone goes to the Great Hall, Dumbledore only creates hundreds of sleeping bags, implying less than 1000 students. Is there any way to know ...

I'm re-reading the second Harry Potter book, this time in French, and I noticed an odd discrepancy. Here is the beginning of chapter 10, "The Rogue Bludger," in English:
Since the disastrous episode of the pixies, Professor Lockhart had not
brought live creatures to class. Instead, he read ...

>If you *know* it was a digitalization, no need to use [tag:web-original]. Use the usual, relevant [tag:books], [tag:comics] or whatever. Mention that you *did* read it online, of course.

If you're rather confident it could have been an original work, sure, go ahead and use [tag:web-original], as well as another relevant media tag, if there is one ([tag:novel], [tag:movie]...). You might be wrong. It happens. We've had [tag:anime] story-ids that turned out to be games, [tag:movies] which were actually TV shows - the story-ID question is how you remember something you'e partially forgotten.…

It's really mixing up things that oughtn't mixed up. A book you read online is for all intents and purposes a book or novel or whatever. But the fact you read the e-book version of it matters zero other than possibly helping identification, which you can as well mention in your question.

On Movies & TV we sometimes got people tagging stuff netflix just because it's about a show produced or even just watched on Netflix. I doubt you'd want to create such a situation, but the proposed tag sounds exactly like that.

I'm not saying possible misuse is to be a sole reason for not doing it. But the tag seems so inconsistent in mixing up stuff that that seems to be the only thing that it will be used for. To say how you watched something.

@Jenayah It causes me having to use my Movies & TV username everywhere in chat, otherwise it doesn't recognize me as a chat moderator. If it wasn't for that I'd either be Christian Rau everywhere, like I was before becoming a moderator, or better, have my respective site name in the individual site chatrooms.

@Jenayah SE really doesn't do well with multiple accounts. You can do it, but if you accidentally happen to merge them (by e.g. using the same browser and messing up cookies or whatever), it's bad luck and there's no guarantee to get it separated out again.

@Jenayah Yeah, but there's so many bugs you can trip over. In theory, SE is allowed to merge accounts whenever it pleases and the system thinks it a good idea. In practice, it probably works best when using two different browers, but that's quite a hassle to keep up.

Anyway, the original idea was to have another media tag, mainly for story-identification, so that answerer's could search for it. For instance, if I've been reading a lot on Tor.com and Wattpad lately, I might be interested in story ID's for web-original specifically. And as my naive search for [story-identification] online is:q has proved, they're hard to find otherwise.

Same thing, though. Of course one can make an argument that adding all kinds of meta info to ID questions as tags might not be the worst idea. But...there's only 5 tags and my opinion about having 5 million special rules for ID is probably known, too.

This was a post I read a few years ago (I can't remember which website).
It was a typical quiz of "which power would you choose?", but someone took it to the next level and posted a short story that had 8 (or 6) characters who all chose one of the powers, and the story was pretty amazing IMO. The...

Several years (a decade at least, maybe longer) ago I read a science-fiction story on a blog and I have been trying to find it, but my google-fu is failing me. I remember the following facts:
It was published online in a blog (I want to say blogspot, but not so sure about that)
At the start the...

However, if you want to make the argument that the way you read it is relevant enough for a tag, which might very well be a point considering, then make that argument, but don't lump it together with media tags that just aren't the same thing.

I read a book years ago, however don't recall the title and I'd like to read it again!
The story involved a creature or alien telling the story from a first person perspective, how he sits and waits and is all alone, until either astronauts or space marines show up.
The story then shifts to a ...

@scaryforkids If this answer is helpful, you can accept it by clicking on the check mark over on the left. That's how we know which questions have received satisfactory answers, and which ones need more research. — user14111Jul 9 '15 at 9:30

I went through every post that showed up on [story-identification] hasaccepted:no and duplicate:yes a while ago, and reopened all the ones that didn't have acceptance comments. It's always possible that I missed some, but I'm inclined to think that there are deleted comments.

(Gah. I can't type...)

Hmm, unless it was answers:0 that I went though. That's a possibility.

Due to the volume of comments generated on the main site, StackOverflow, some comments can be "nuked" by a single user with a "no longer needed" flag. This is a built-in functionality available on all SE sites. The only requirement to use it is to have 15 reputation points.
There is a user that ...

Hold your horses, what exaactly shouldn't be flagged in comments? I've been flagging a bunch of "possible duplicate of [question that was already the dupe-target mentioned in dupe-banner]" comments, as well as "please accept checkmark blahblahblah" when it was accepted, but left for instance a bunch of "the policy on dupes is targeting the better question" stuff. Am I doing this wrong?

The issue here is when the OP comments on a story-ID "That's correct, thanks!", without accepting it through the system, and that comment is deleted. That causes an issue. Otherwise, those are noise and can be deleted.

@Jenayah Unless you're getting declines they should be fine. And all of us get declines at times - I've had 230 flags declined across the network (60 on SFF). Sometimes the decline is in error, even ;)

Although scifi.stackexchange.com/q/148842/4918 "Spanish-language comic book story about time-traveling Jewish kids becoming the legendary Adam and Eve?" story-id with no answer is tempting to bounty too.

I think Mith meant cases like "okay, the answer to that question was The Profession, now let's search for [story-identification] the profession - oh wait, comments aren't brought up, so while there might be some answers in comments, good luck to find the dupes"

For instance, this google search returns a couple of sentences from the book I am interested in. I can then go and copy-paste those sentences into another document. However, I would like to copy-paste a few paragraphs surrounding these sentences. What's the most convenient way to do that?

Reading Anna's answer here on legitimate reasons why moderators may flag posts and (possibly) mark them as helpful, I was interested to see what would happen for comment flags.
So I happily flagged a couple of comments with the other message of testing to see if this could be used in a similar...